The long goodbye

In April 2008 Nuala O'Faolain was interviewed on Irish radio. She had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. She had been living in New York, but as soon as she got sick, she said: "I sort of knew I should get to Ireland." Since the publication in 1996 of her memoir, Are You Somebody?, O'Faolain had become a celebrity in her home country. Her life was like a soap opera - all affairs and adventures. The interview was a teary farewell to the Irish people. "It must look as if I'm an awful devil for publicity altogether," she said. She probably was. But then again, she was also an extraordinary individual, and an exceptional writer. The interview - full of bitter laments, and honesty and rage - travelled around the world. Transcripts and excerpts appeared in newspapers. It became a podcast. There was a moment of flurry. And then a few weeks later, O'Faolain - the most vivid of characters - was dead.

Best Love, Rosie

by
Nuala O'Faolain

Best Love, Rosie, O'Faolain's posthumously published novel, is best read as a long addendum to the interview, an apologia pro vita sua in fiction. It is a summation, a record of a brilliant mind attempting to come to rest.

The story O'Faolain chooses to tell is this. A woman called Rosie has long lived abroad; she is probably "about the most qualified Teacher of English as a Foreign Language in the world". She has been everywhere and done everything. She's the kind of woman "who could tell you where to buy the best buffalo mozzarella in Rome, or where to stay in Bayeux if you went to see the tapestry, or how to reach the ruins of Persepolis if ever you were in Shiraz". She is 54, nearing 55. She has never married. And she has never had children. She resembles Nuala O'Faolain in almost every regard. She has a few regrets. "Why couldn't I have been the kind of woman Rilke fell for?" for example. "All furs and a brilliant mind. With a castle." But suddenly she finds herself, in late middle age, having fallen into a world "that had mostly women in it, and gay men, and men very satisfied with their marriages".

The weary, globe-trotting Rosie returns to a dull Dublin to look after her ageing aunt, Min, a woman who has been nowhere and done nothing, and who seems destined to spend her final years in a haze of drink and memories. But then Rosie goes on a trip to New York and Min follows her, and an unexpected role reversal occurs. Min stays on in the States, and rediscovers her zest for life, and Rosie returns to Ireland and repose. They begin to see the world afresh.

The novel contains subplots aplenty, and a cast of supporting characters. There is also an improbable, wind-lashed, sea-swept romantic cottage, only an hour outside Dublin, whose restoration brings Rosie much succour, and finally a revelation in the closing pages that helps explain Rosie's deep sense of displacement. But as a reader you're conscious of not really caring much about all these other people, or the places: you read on simply for the endlessly thrumming thoughts of O'Faolain's proxy, Rosie. Rosie muses casually, page after page, about the torments of ageing, and about sexual desire, and jealousy. Lovemaking she describes as "the only completely worthwhile use of time I knew, apart from reading something like Proust". She is seized with "an ungovernable nostalgia for long, boozy lunches with people who fancied you". She sits in her cottage and is frank with herself and with others, attempting to understand her imprisonment in her own solitary experience and to find meaning in the many episodes in her life.

Best Love, Rosie is not a great novel. But then it's not intended as a great novel. It's intended as an imparting of wisdom - in which the dead speak, restlessly, for ever.

• Ian Sansom's The Delegates' Choice is published by Harper Perennial.